For a couple hours yesterday morning, one of the safest places in Northeast Florida may well have been council chambers at City Hall, Green Cove Springs. There were at least six uniformed police officers—a couple in full battle rattle. There were some more of them in plainclothes, and there was Chief Shawn Hines, the star of the show.

Ever since Amendment 3 was approved for the ballot there’s been a buzzing in the bonnets of Green Cove folks—not quite a 911 emergency, just a low grade angst. The November 3 referendum question, if passed, would slash the municipal side of the property tax bill for most Florida homeowners.

Described as a “commuter county,” Clay County can expect to lose as much as 30 percent of its revenue, and for tiny Green Cove it could be worse. “If the proposed property tax referendum passes, the estimated financial impact to the City would be approximately $1 million in Fiscal Year 2027-28 and $1.6 million in FY 2028-29,” Acting City Manager Mike Null told Clay News & Views.

For context, the city’s proposed operating budget for the coming year is $11.3 million. For even more context, the city’s police department budget accounts for more than $5.6 million of that, more than half.

Ostensibly, Chief Hines was on hand to explain and defend his 2027-28 budget to the council, but the possibility of Amendment 3 passing hung over the proceedings like the smell of rain on asphalt.

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When Hines got wind that councilors and ordinary citizens were having serious conversations about maybe having to ditch the police in favor of a cheaper deal from the Sheriff’s Department—and then Sheriff Michelle Cook offered to oblige with a quote—the chief embarked on a lobbying campaign.

Hines visited every single councilor individually since Florida Sunshine law prohibits them from gathering as a group to discuss city business in any informal setting. His demeanor was described as “upset and hurt,” as if the very act of discussing going over to the county would make the possibility more likely.

It’s abundantly clear from interviews and what councilors said at the meeting yesterday that all of them are pleased with Green Cove police as an institution, but that was no reason, Mayor Darren Stutts said, not to have conversations now, even if the potential impacts are a full budget cycle in the future:

We don’t know what’s going to happen with that vote. So we’ll see what happens in November. It will be more next year’s budget. But I know it has gone through the community. I’ve got calls from citizens about it. I’ve got calls from lots of people about it, reporters asking about it, wanting to know what we’re going to do.

So, it’s hard just not to say anything. And citizens, you know, they’re concerned—both sides. Some don’t want to get rid of it (the police department). Some of them, you know, encourage us to do just that. We have to look at both sides of it. But as a whole, I firmly believe that none of us want to do that. That would be our last resort with no other options on the table.

Privately at least, some councilors admit that they can see no other viable options.

Amendment 3 would increase homestead exemptions for primary residences to $150,000 in 2027 and $250,000 in 2028. After that, increases in the exemption would be tied to the Consumer Price Index, and assessment increases on other types of property would be limited to 5 percent a year.

If the referendum passes, economists predict that statewide property tax revenues will plummet by around $5 billion in its first year and as much as $11.8 billion per year after five years.

You can bet that Green Cove is not alone in its dilemma. All over Florida, municipalities with small departments—often defined as those with fewer than 50 officers—have to be asking the same questions.

Hines started his presentation by noting that polls showed just 61 percent support for the amendment, which is a fragile lead in vote that requires 60 percent approval to pass.

The past few weeks have seen a host of organizations come out against Amendment 3, making essentially two arguments:

1. Such drastic cuts will degrade and disrupt public services, and

2. By shifting funding decisions to the state, Tallahassee will usurp decision-making powers that were traditionally vested in local governing bodies.

Besides the Democratic Party, amendment opponents include the Florida State Fraternal Order of Police, which issued a statement Friday saying:

We oppose the current Amendment 3 because it creates far too much uncertainty about how local governments would continue to fund law enforcement, fire rescue, emergency medical services, and other critical public safety functions. Public safety should never become collateral damage with uncertain fiscal consequences.”

The uncertainty comes from the fact that, although public safety coverage cannot be eliminated altogether because of Amendment 3 cuts, the measure does not prevent decision-makers from shopping for a better deal to maintain that coverage.

Ostensibly, Hines’ plea to the City Council was to fend off any elimination of positions from the 2026-27 budget. Hines described his 28-officer department as being stretched thin. At the same time, his message was about the high quality of local police work, effectively laying out what was at stake in November.

As it happens, Hines is a decent public speaker. He talked about crime rates, the proportion of crimes solved, and the sheer volume of calls that were getting answered and the department’s four-minute-53-seconds response time, which compared favorably to that of the county or even Orange Park.

There were 5,820 traffic stops in Green Cove over the past year, Hines said, only 39 percent of which resulted in a written citation. He did not say it, though you could imagine him doing so, that most of those were out-of-towners anyway.

Hines talked about organizational culture. He made it clear that all his patrol officers, none of whom have more than two years of experience here, are expected to be nice to people.

One of the factors that makes the idea of having the Sheriff’s Department take over responsibility for Green Cove attractive is that the current sheriff is very popular and seems competent. She has a slick social media operation burnishing that image on a daily basis. She just had a house built in the city.

Based on her predecessor alone, though, no one can predict whether her replacement will be anywhere near as good. In fact, hardly anyone alive today remembers that Green Cove Spring established its own police department to escape from under the yoke of a sheriff who was both a bully and a criminal racketeer.

His name was J.P. Hall, and it took a group of hardened veterans coming back after World War II to stand up to Hall, and wrest control over law enforcement within city limits from him.

Despite the opposition, despite the potential chaos and loss of local control, there’s a real possibility the amendment may pass. If Clay County is any gauge, Floridians do not trust their governments to spend wisely, and they will be reminded of that mistrust at the worst possible time.

Tax bills will be mailed out by county tax collectors to arrive by November 1—two days before the November election. Collection begins immediately.

The anonymous author describes the work he does as “real Christian investigative journalism.” He describes himself as a former tech and finance guy who has morphed into a “hobojournalist.” He lives in Florida. Like us here at Clay News & Views, he publishes a Substack newsletter. His writing speciality is dissecting the “rigged game” that is 21st century America. This story, first published yesterday, is reprinted here with permission.

To the point, 1,130 days have gone by since Sheriff Michelle Cook’s office hired Flock Safety to install license plate reading cameras throughout the county—without ever having discussed her plan with the people who live here. No vote was ever taken.

By THE WISE WOLF

It’s February in the Florida Keys and a Monroe County sheriff’s deputy named Lamar Roman is doing 70 on a two-lane bridge highway, passing a dump truck in a no-passing zone, then another, then swinging clear across the double yellow so a white pickup has to yank itself off the road to keep a family from dying on US 1. Lights on. Sirens on. Somewhere ahead is the fugitive he’s burning county gas to catch…

A 27-year-old actress he wanted to sleep with.

That’s the emergency?

He’d met her weeks earlier working security on the set of “Bad Monkey,” the recent Vince Vaughn TV show set in the Keys. She got off the extras bus, he whistled at her, and he kept circling all day until other extras were physically pulling her away from him. She said she had a boyfriend. His answer, preserved in his own arrest report, was “I need your name and number just in case I pull you over some day.”

She took it as a creepy joke. It was a project plan. He put her car on a camera watch list, and when the network spotted her weeks later, he nearly killed a truckload of strangers to run her down, pulled her over for nothing, and asked why she hadn’t followed him back on Instagram. “I told you I’d find you and pull you over.” Never logged the stop. He knew it was worth hiding.

Now, here’s where you expect me to say the system failed. The system did not fail. Cameras photographed her car, a database served up her location, and a man with power used it on someone who couldn’t say no. That IS the system. Everything else is the sales brochure.

The network is called Flock, and it photographed you this week. So before we go one step further, you deserve to know exactly how big the thing that’s watching you actually is.

Brace yourself, because when I ran the numbers I had to scream at my motel room wall. They are building East Berlin here. That’s the article. Everything below Is the receipts!

The Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, kept files on a third of their own country. Doing it took 90,000 employees and a nation of informants ratting out their neighbors, and it stands as one of the most complete tyrannies ever constructed over human beings. My generation grew up being told that surveillance machine was the reason we were the good guys. We didn’t file our citizens.

Their own brag is 20 billion vehicle scans a month. More than 5,000 communities, 49 states, every scan stamped with time and place, stored 30 days, searchable from any cop’s laptop. And your town’s cameras are not your town’s cameras. Flock admitted to Senator Ron Wyden that 75 percent of its police customers joined something called the National Lookup Tool, meaning a deputy in Texas pulls a month of your movements in Pennsylvania without asking a soul in Pennsylvania. One login, one country, one file on everybody. The Stasi would have wept at the elegance.

And while that file gets fatter every day, our ruling class stares across the Pacific at China, where the cameras feed a social credit system that decides who boards a train and whose bank account works this week, and their reaction has not been horror. It’s been envy. Every piece of that machine is being assembled here, right now, in the open, and the license plate cameras going up on your street are its skeleton. That’s my thesis. Hold me to it.

But a thesis needs evidence, so let’s start with the question you should be asking. What happens when a machine like this gets pointed at one specific person somebody in power wants? We don’t have to guess. It’s already happened to American women dozens of times, and Deputy Roman up there was nowhere near the worst of them.

The Machine on Day One

The Institute for Justice, a civil liberties law firm, counts at least 24 officers caught using plate readers to stalk women they wanted or exes who got away, and those only surfaced because the victims felt hunted and forced the issue, since departments audit their Flock use about as often as I floss. Nobody catches these guys. The women catch them.

The police chief of Sedgwick, Kansas ran his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend through the system more than 200 times in four months. The chief. The man misconduct gets reported to.

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A lieutenant in Kechi, Kansas tracked his estranged wife and texted her “You were spotted on Meridian.” She told detectives she’d started telling relatives where her kids were in case she came up missing or murdered. Her words, in the affidavit, about a man still wearing a badge while he hunted her.

An Orange City, Florida officer ran his ex’s plate 69 times, her mother’s 24, her father’s 15, and dropped an Apple AirTag tracking device in her wallet in case eighty thousand cameras lost her. His partner saw her plate photos on his screen and told him to cut it out. He said he knew. He kept going. That was the entire oversight apparatus. A coworker going, “dude.”

In Joplin, Missouri, one officer ran one woman’s plate nearly 400 times. And Milwaukee takes the crown, because when an officer there allegedly tracked a woman and her ex over 170 times, the department assigned a 22-year veteran detective to investigate him, and prosecutors now say the detective spent that same stretch using Flock to stalk two victims of his own. One found a GPS tracker under their car. He logged his searches as “training.”

The man investigating the Flock stalker was a Flock stalker. And understand, these are the clumsy ones, the ones caught by their own girlfriends. Hand the same machine to people who are smart, patient, and salaried to make problems like you go away, and tell me how you’d ever find out.

Worse, you don’t even have to be somebody’s target. You can just be a database error, which is how a Colorado woman named Chrisanna Elser answered her door to a cop holding time-stamped Flock photos of her truck and a charge for stealing a package off a porch. She didn’t do it. Didn’t matter, the camera had spoken, and she spent weeks pulling footage from her own truck and a neighbor’s doorbell to prove she never stopped driving, doing his job for free under threat of a criminal record, before the charge quietly died. No apology came with it.

She got off easy. In Los Angeles, an audit found the LAPD tracked 161 people whose cars were falsely flagged as stolen, and a stolen-car stop means guns out, face on asphalt, kids screaming in the back seat, over a database burp. East Berlin at least needed an informant to lie about you. Here a server hiccup does it free of charge.

The LAPD actually walked away from its Flock contract this month, and not over those 161 human beings. They walked because the contract never answered a basic question. Who owns all this data? Sit with the fact that the police department didn’t know. Then follow me into the answer, because it’s where this story stops being about cops and starts being about the men above them.

Follow the Money Into the Black Box

On paper, Flock Group Inc. is a private company from the Atlanta suburbs, founded in 2017 with a cute origin story about three guys and a neighborhood burglar that they trot out at every council meeting. Nine years later it’s valued at $8.4 billion and clearing $300 million a year. CEO Garrett Langley says the mission is to eliminate crime. Not reduce. Eliminate.

When a man promises to eliminate sin itself, hold your wallet and count your rights, because a mission like that has no natural stopping point. Every camera that fails to eliminate crime becomes the argument for the next camera.

Who funds a mission like that? The bluest blood in American tech money. Andreessen Horowitz led the $275 million round that vaulted Flock to $7.5 billion. Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund is on the ownership roster, with Tiger Global, Kleiner Perkins, Y Combinator, and the rest of the usual table.

You believe that crowd writes nine-figure checks to a camera company out of passion for recovering stolen Hyundais? These men build control systems. It’s the family business. The subscription fees are the storefront. The dragnet is the merchandise.

And when they soothe you that it’s all safely American owned, translate that correctly. Venture funds pass through money from limited partners who are legally allowed to stay anonymous. Sovereign wealth funds, foreign fortunes, whoever. The nameplates are American. The money behind the nameplates is a black box, by design, and nobody who tells you otherwise can see inside it either.

Fine, you say, but at least the data itself is locked up tight, right? A national tracking file this sensitive must be guarded like Fort Knox. I’m glad you asked, because a musician from the Atlanta suburbs decided to check.

His name is Benn Jordan, YouTuber, recording artist, and lately Flock’s most persistent migraine. Researchers working with him found Flock cameras streaming straight to the open internet, running software so old it stopped getting security updates in 2021, with 30 days of stored footage viewable, and in some cases deletable, by whoever strolled in. Police login credentials for the system were sitting for sale on the dark web. Beijing doesn’t need to buy this data. The password is taped to the monitor.

Now, you’d think a company caught in that state would grovel, patch, and thank the man. What actually happened next tells you more about Flock than everything above combined.

They built a machine that watches 300 million people and bets every single one stays quiet about it. So far the bet is paying. Share this and cost them some money.

Watchers Hate Being Watched

Jordan took his findings to the city council of Dunwoody, Georgia, in Flock’s own backyard, and demonstrated on the record how he got into the cameras. The council stalled the vote in February, stalled again in March, and then in April a resident stood up with public records showing a Flock employee had pulled up a live view of cameras inside the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta. The fitness center. The pool. The gymnastics room, where children practice. An employee of the crime-elimination company, watching kids’ gymnastics on the company system, discovered only because one man filed a records request.

Dunwoody renewed the contract anyway.

Then Tommy G took his turn. He’s the documentarian who’s filmed inside the Clayton County jail and gang territory in South Central, every place in America that hates cameras, and this year he pointed his lens at Flock itself. Two things happened. Filming the company that photographs 20 billion cars a month got police on him with a response time your average burglary victim can only dream about. And when he drove to the headquarters address Flock lists publicly, he found an empty building. Vacant. A decoy. The real offices are somewhere you’re not told, because the people logging your every pharmacy run have decided THEIR location is sensitive.

They know where your car sleeps. You’re not allowed to know where they work. And when citizens built HaveIBeenFlocked.com so ordinary people could check public records and see whether cops ran their plates, Flock reportedly went after it repeatedly, trying to get transparency tools shut down. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear, remember. Their line. It never once applies to them. In East Berlin the Stasi files were secret too, right up until the wall came down and Germans lined up around the block to read what their government had on them. Ask yourself what’s in your file. Then ask why you’re not allowed to know.

While you’re at it, ask the question that should have ended this company on day one. How is any of this legal? The Fourth Amendment exists. You have a constitutional right against exactly this. So how are they doing it? Through a loophole so stupid it circles back to brilliant, and once I show it to you, you will never unsee it.

A Fourth Amendment Doggy Door

The Fourth Amendment forbids the GOVERNMENT from tracking you without a warrant. It says nothing about a private company, because the Founders never imagined a startup renting a national dragnet back to the police as a monthly service. So Flock, private company, owns the cameras and the data, and the government never “collects” anything, wink. A cop wanting a month of your life doesn’t visit a judge. He types your plate into a search box and fills in a little field marked “reason.” The ACLU of Massachusetts pulled the audit logs to see what officers actually write in that field before launching a warrantless national search of an American citizen. They write “investigation.” Several just typed “susp.”

Four letters between you and a coast-to-coast manhunt. Your warrant protection, two centuries of case law, bypassed by a text field nobody reads.

And once you’ve built a door nobody guards, you stop controlling who walks through it. Police logs showed Flock data flowing to ICE, including out of jurisdictions whose own laws forbid it, until public backlash forced Flock to flip a switch, which tells you the safeguard was always just a switch. Then Texas showed us the floor.

A deputy ran a warrantless nationwide search across millions of drivers with the logged reason “had an abortion, search for female.” When the investigative outlet 404 Media caught it, the sheriff swore it was a welfare check, pure concern for a woman who might bleed to death. Then the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, pried the documents loose. Month-long death investigation. Prosecutors consulted about charging her. Detectives dispatched. They hunted a woman across state lines over her own pregnancy loss, got caught, and lied to the entire country about it.

Before you file that under somebody else’s politics, look closer, because the lesson isn’t about abortion. The lesson is that this machine doesn’t check your voter registration. It hunts whoever the person at the keyboard hates, and the keyboard changes hands every election. Whoever you are, somewhere out there is a future official who despises people exactly like you, and we are building his toolkit on a municipal payment plan.

Which raises the last question, the one this whole article has been walking toward. What does the finished toolkit look like? You don’t have to imagine it. There’s a country where it’s already running, and our tech lords have been taking notes.

China wired itself with hundreds of millions of cameras feeding systems they actually named Skynet, after the machine that wipes out mankind in the Terminator movies, because apparently nobody in Beijing watched the ending. Welded to social credit, it works like this. Fall below the line, sue the wrong official, attend the wrong church, post the wrong sentence, and the apparatus quietly switches off your life. Tens of millions blacklisted from planes and trains. Bank accounts frozen without trial. A man who was a lawyer on Monday can’t buy a train ticket on Friday, and no human being anywhere had to sign anything or look him in the eye.

Now bring it home, because every component is already on American soil. The cameras are Flock. The data fusion is Palantir. The chokepoint is the march to a cashless society, where cutting a man off from his own money is one field in one record. And the precedent for wiring American infrastructure to interests that never face an American voter got penciled in this year with Section 219 of the defense bill, which I covered last month, when Congress decided foreign access to our military systems was a feature.

Stack it all up and run the tape forward. You could have ten grand in the bank or ten million. One post the machine’s owners don’t like, one flag on one record, and your card stops working at the pharmacy, the grocery store, the gas pump. Nobody arrests you. Nothing so honest as an arrest. You’re just switched off, and you’ll spend months on hold hunting for a human being with the authority to switch you back on, and there isn’t one.

I promised this wouldn’t turn into a sermon, so take it as history instead. Two thousand years ago a prisoner exiled on a Greek island described a system where no man could buy or sell without the mark of the power that watched him, and for twenty centuries sophisticated people chuckled at the old mystic. The system is under construction. It has a sales team and a customer support line. (Chuckle accordingly.)

So that’s the machine, the money, the loophole, and the destination. If I’ve done my job you’re angry now, and the only remaining question is whether that anger can actually do anything.

It can, and it already is.

Get Mad Now, While Mad Still Works

This machine still has an off switch, and terrified local politicians are the switch. The LAPD just walked away from its Flock contract. Cities across Texas and California are shredding theirs. A lawsuit in Norfolk, Virginia argues the whole dragnet violates the Fourth Amendment, and Congressman Keith Self of Texas just filed a bill barring federal agencies from touching Flock data without a warrant. His whole argument fits in three words. Get a warrant.

So do the thing that’s already working. File a public records request for your town’s Flock audit logs. Take them to the council meeting and read the search reasons out loud, and watch “it’s only for stolen cars” die on contact with a log entry that says “susp.” Call your congressman and tell him to back the Self bill, in those three words if you like.

Ordinary furious residents holding receipts at a podium are killing these contracts every single month, and there is no lobbying budget on earth that beats them.

The East Germans had to tear their wall down with hand tools after forty years.

Yours is still on the loading dock. Cheaper to refuse delivery.

Learn more about the candidate on his website:
Taking Back Florida

By HISTORICAL ARCHIVES CENTER STAFF

When World War II started, Clay County did not have much of a military presence, but once America joined the battle, the county exploded with growth.

The United States Navy built Lee Field and named it after a local Naval aviator who was killed in World War I, Benjamin Lee. It was officially opened on September 11, 1940. The Navy spent $1.8 million on the base which had four 5,000-foot runways which were heavily used.

Statewide during WWII, there were more people in naval aviation training than are employed today by the Florida State University System. Lee Field was home to famous flight instructors like Johnny Carson’s sidekick Ed McMahon and boasted famous flight students like Joe Kennedy Jr., President Kennedy’s older brother.

After the war ended, the Lee Field’s riverfront area became home to the Navy’s Mothball Fleet. Thirteen 1,500-foot-long piers were constructed, and hundreds of ships were decommissioned, cleaned, stored and put into “mothballs” for future use.

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The facility employed 5,000 Navy personnel and 1,000 civilians. Many Clay County residents are descendants of the sailors stationed at the base, who stayed to make this their home. In 1964, the Mothball Fleet closed shop, and Lee Field became Reynolds Industrial Park. The Military Museum of North Florida is located there and is well worth the visit.

During the same general timeframe, the United States Army was not to be outdone. They turned a Florida National Guard base into Camp Blanding. It was named after General Albert H. Blanding, as is Blanding Boulevard (mostly because the road led to Camp Blanding). At one time, the general was the chief of the National Guard. Over the years, the Army created a massive facility that today spreads out more than 73,000 acres.

The camp is a Continuity of Government site for the governor and his executive branch (the Florida version of the White House Bunker). At the height of the war, Camp Blanding had the equivalent population of the fourth largest city in Florida (St. Petersburg with 60,000 residents), over 10,000 buildings, 125 miles of paved roads, and the largest hospital in the state of Florida.

Camp Blanding also housed German prisoners of war. Being interred at the camp was apparently a reward for the imprisoned submariners that cooperated with their U.S. captors. It also housed 343 Japanese, German and Italian immigrant residents of the United States as an internment camp.

After the war ended, the camp was returned to the custody of the Florida National Guard.

Camp Blanding is now also home to a wonderful museum and airplane garden at the front gates. Check it out this summer!

The type of Sea-Doo Switch hybrid jetski-pontoon boat that flipped over on the St. Johns River here, leaving a Florida toddler crippled for life, will soon be equipped with a sensor-driven system designed to prevent accidents like that one.

The Switch has been shown to flip over forward under the right conditions. BRP recently announced that when the vessel senses those conditions, the machine itself will take control over the throttle.

This is the second remidiation effort by manufacturer BRP. The first was a safety recall to seal the hulls from half-filling with water that might then rush forward during deceleration, helping to plunge the nose of the boat under water.

Besides the Clay County infant—her name is Vianca Grullon—four Switch passengers have died after a forward flip. In October, the U.S. Coast Guard declared that these vessels presented a “capsizing hazard.”

“These capsizings have occurred when the vessel was operated with trim by the bow and the bow ‘digging into’ the water. Weather conditions and poor seamanship do not appear to be significant contributing factors,” Coast Guard investigators wrote.

BRP is fighting a $30 million lawsuit filed by the Grullons after Vianca suffered a “castastrophic anoxic brain injury” after the family Switch flipped forward on the St. Johns River, trapping her underwater for around 10 minutes. BRP blames Vianca’s father who it says was negligent in his operation of the vessel, and that’s why the boat flipped.

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On May 28, BRP announced the introduction of the Intelligent Balance Assist system in a letter to Switch owners. The Canadian company said iBA was part of a new collection of “SMART accessories that automatically respond to vehicle inputs to support the overall riding experience.”

BRP did not mention the word “capsize” in the letter, but did say:

iBA helps operators avoid bow-down operation of the watercraft by temporarily lowering the throttle, which reduces the risk of capsizing, when it detects a combination of specific factors indicating a need for the operator to rebalance and evenly distribute passengers or cargo. These factors include speed, throttle input, and negative trim caused by front overload.

Typically, operators resolve front overload by evenly redistributing passenger and/or cargo weight to rebalance the watercraft. If an operator continues accelerating without rebalancing, iBA will prompt the operator to rebalance.

Once iBA engages, full throttle capacity will resume only when the watercraft is rebalanced. Operators may need to relocate passenger and cargo weight distribution to achieve even weight distribution and balance the watercraft.

In other words, in order to avoid the conditions that lead to those fatal or near fatal flips mentioned at the beginning of the story, the machine takes control from the operator.

Control can be complicated. Switch owner Brian Garrison once described the technique that he used to avoid plunging the nose of the boat when decelerating.

Slow down evenly and gradually. Then when your wake catches up to you, just before it hits, increase gas slightly to counter the push of the wake on the back of the boat, then ease off again. repeat to keep the bow up until the wake evens out and the boat settles. Basically, stopping too fast can cause the momentum of the boat to push the nose down, if you combine that with the push that the boat’s own wake catching up to it, that also causes the nose to dip. Combine that with any waves you may hit, that could further dip the bow. Combine that with too much weight in the front, and you have a bad day.

To the largely inexperienced customer base that is drawn to the Switch’s affordable price and promise of fun on the water, the iBA may prove a godsend. All models will come standard with the technology in 2027, and BRP will retrofit earlier models free of charge. (There are four models from 13 to 21 feet LOA, powered by 130 or 170 horsepower Rotax jet drives.)

Despite the application of this largely accepted automotive-style technology to a watercraft, a vocal cadre of owners balked at the notion of ceding control of their boat to an onboard computer. The naysayers are making their voices heard—where else?—on Facebook.

“Purely a CYA by BRP. my guess is it will be a throttle tune to spread out throttle closing event preventing a more than 50 percent throttle to zero percent throttle from happening to quickly,” Devin Lott said.

“This is for the stupid and oblivious drivers,” Geoffrey Mellot wrote. “I routinely drive with the bow a little overloaded. the quick fix is to accelerate more rapidly from idle or a slow speed. There is a speed where the bow will plow down, but that’s still pretty slow, and self correcting after a time or two, if the driver is paying attention when/why water comes over the deck.”

“I’d trust a drink from Bill Cosby before I trust that system,” Steve Giacobbi said.

A lawyer for the Grullons reacted to BRP’s announcement. “This product is going down very fast,” Attorney Judd Rosen said.

The Grullon lawsuit is in it’s deposition phase as Grullon family lawyers grill BRP executives and engineers. Trial is scheduled to begin on October 5 in the Circuit Court of Duval County before Judge Katie Dearing.

The author is an environmental accountability reporter at The Florida Trib, which first published this story on July 1, 2026. It is reprinted here with permission.

By NICOLAS RIVERO

An industry-backed state law that takes effect July 1 will make it easier for developers to turn farmland into suburban subdivisions over the objections of local governments and communities.

The bill’s sponsors say they’re defending Floridians’ property rights. Environmental activists say it’s the latest step the state legislature has taken to speed suburban sprawl and weaken local power to regulate zoning and environmental protections.

The law, SB 686, paves the way for landowners to build homes and businesses in “agricultural enclaves,” tracts of farmland surrounded on 75 percent of their boundaries by urban development or highways. These landowners can turn farms and timberland into suburbs and business parks, no matter what the local zoning plan or the community says.

The law authorizes single-family homes, but not apartment buildings, in agricultural enclaves next to neighborhoods or land zoned for future development. If the surrounding properties have commercial or industrial buildings, landowners can build those, too.

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Once a landowner applies for an agricultural enclave designation, local governments must hold a public hearing and approve or deny the request within 90 days, or it will be approved automatically. Landowners can appeal denials to a circuit court.

The law expires Jan. 1, 2028, giving landowners 18 months to act.

“Our main concern is that it will help to proliferate sprawl in Florida, moving the urban area into areas that are currently agricultural or natural without requiring those landowners to undergo the same type of public hearings and public planning efforts that other landowners would have to go through,” said Kim Dinkins, policy and planning director for 1000 Friends of Florida, a nonprofit that promotes land conservation and denser urban development.

The law’s House sponsor, Bonita Springs Republican Adam Botana, said he supported the bill to stick up for landowners facing unreasonable red tape from local governments.

“Sometimes certain municipalities and counties get a little big for their britches, and they need to be either restricted or cut back,” he said.

Anna Eskamani, a Democratic House member from Orlando who voted against the law, said local oversight is critical to rein in “large special interests that are able to influence the legislature to create land use policies that are in their favor.”

“Once you lose farmland and pasture land to development, it never goes back,” she said. “We are just at so much risk in Florida of building over everything.”

Paving Conservation Land

Botana said the law addresses critics’ environmental concerns by forbidding landowners to apply for an agricultural enclave designation in the Everglades Protection Area, the Wekiva Study Area and other environmentally sensitive spots listed as “areas of critical state concern,” including Big Cypress, the Green Swamp Area and the Florida Keys.

Military installations and ranges, land under a conservation easement and all of Miami-Dade and Broward counties are also exempt.

But environmentalists say those limits don’t go far enough.

“You have environmental ecosystems everywhere in the state that might not be labeled as of critical concern, but are important to drainage, flood prevention, threatened species and quality of life,” said Eskamani.

There are millions of acres of farms and ranches in the Florida Wildlife Corridor that the state hasn’t bought or put under a conservation easement yet. Dinkins said the agricultural enclave law makes it easier to develop “vulnerable areas at the urban fringe” that could be important to conserve one day.

“We ought to be doing what we can to keep those farms viable because they provide a buffer from rampant development,” said Gil Smart, policy director of the nonprofit Friends of the Everglades. “But that’s not what we’re doing. This legislation makes it easier to pave it over.”

‘Everybody Has a Boss’

The state legislature’s nonpartisan analysis of the law’s impact doesn’t say how many potential agricultural enclaves there are in Florida. But Botana said there are “probably, in total, five or 10” cases where Florida landowners might use the agricultural enclave designation.

“You have cities or counties that don’t want to change the rights for that person. They just say, ‘No, we want to keep this little green area,’” Botana said, adding, “When that happens, people come and say, ‘Hey, this is unfair.’”

Botana declined to say whether he heard that from specific landowners or whether the bill was designed to grease the wheels for a particular development. Big business groups including the Associated Industries of Florida supported the bill.

“Everybody has a boss, right?” Botana said. “At the end of the day, it’s the people who put you in office.”

Limiting Local Government

Environmentalists say the agricultural enclave law is part of a bigger project in Tallahassee to weaken local governments and empower developers.

The legislature passed the Live Local Act in 2023, allowing developers to ignore zoning, density and height restrictions for projects that include affordable housing. Lawmakers amended or expanded the measure in 2024, 2025 and 2026. Last year, they passed SB 180, barring local governments from creating any new development rules “more restrictive and burdensome” than existing requirements, effectively freezing local zoning.

“There’s been so much legislation in the last few years to help developers develop more quickly, with less public oversight and we would say more recklessly, while undermining local community planning processes,” said Smart.

Ocala Republican Stan McClain, who sponsored the agricultural enclave bill in the state senate, introduced another bill this year that would allow developers to build mega-projects totalling more than 10,000 acres on rural land without local zoning approval or public hearings. The “Blue Ribbon Projects” bill failed to pass a committee vote.

But the agricultural enclave law may offer hope for supporters of the Blue Ribbon Projects bill. When McClain first introduced the agricultural enclave bill in 2025, it narrowly lost a committee vote. He reintroduced the bill this year and it passed overwhelmingly.

“Bad ideas in Tallahassee never truly die. They’re just resurrected in the next legislative session,” Smart said. “I fully expect to see the Blue Ribbon Projects bill back.”

It was the first Friday of June, and “Boater Skip Day” had drawn thousands of open-boat partygoers to a sandbar off Bayard Point in the St. Johns River. They anchored. They rafted vessels together. All day long, they pounded down cans of Michelob Ultra and gawd-awful booze spritzers so favored by Millennials.

So, by late-afternoon—Yeti coolers depleted—a certain percentage of happy skippers drunk-drove their center-consoles and pontoon boats back to base. As always for big events, the river cops were out in force to deter bad behavior, but this year was different.

This was the first Boater Skip Day since a new Florida law went into effect preventing state and local police from boarding civilian boats for “random safety inspections,” a pretext in which a whiff of regurgitated Ultra begets a field sobriety test.

Not anymore, probable cause only, according to the Boater Freedom Act of 2025. An operator would have to be seen actually engaging in bonehead behavior to get arrested.

Remarkably, however, there was only one major bonehead event in the aftermath of Skip Day this year. Ironically, the crash involved two of the most certifiably sober boats in the crowd. Two Putnam County Sheriff’s Department patrol boats collided, after one had thrown its operator into the river and then ran in circles like a scalded dog until it hit the other.

This is the part that’s not amusing: None of the four officers involved in the crash was badly hurt, but reading the after-action report makes it clear that people could have been killed. Preliminary estimates priced the amount to repair damage to the patrol boats at $55,000.

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The accident happened during a “training exercise,” according to the Fish & Wildlife officer who investigated:

While returning to Palatka from patroling and boating safety enforcement, the deputies began conducting training exercises involving tactical vessel approaches and wake crossings. During these maneuvers, both vessels were heading north on the river, on plane, at an unknown speed. V2 was lead vessel and V1 was following behind on the starboard side. V1 crossed the wake of V2 to approach the port side. While crossing, V1 overcorrected the steering which ejected the occupant. Deputy Riley was not wearing a vessel kill switch when he was ejected. V1 began spinning under power in a clockwise direction. V2 pulled Deputy Riley from the water.

(Kill switches were in the news recently. One of them played a part in the unsolved case of the wife who disappeared during a dinghy ride in the Bahamas. On April 4, Lynette Hooker supposedly fell overboard, and her body was never found. Her husband Brian said he couldn’t save her because the boat’s outboard motor stopped running.

(The suggestion is that Lynette, not Brian, was the person connected to the motor’s kill switch by a lanyard. By going overboard, she shut down the motor.)

In Florida, it is a violation to operate a jetski without attaching the kill-switch lanyard. However, marine police have been known to lecture civilian operators that this is also a “best practice” when underway in any outboard watercraft.

‘Bullet Boat’

Vessel 1, as the FWC officer calls it, was being operated by Deputy John Riley (experience: 10 to 100 hours). The failure to attach the kill-switch lanyard to himself is an omission right out of Water Cop 101 and the root cause of everything that followed. In the parlance of marine law enforcement, V1 had become the “bullet boat,” but, unlike a bullet, runaways inevitably adopt a circular path. In this case, the boat circled clockwise.

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According to the Fish & Wildlife report, released yesterday, the Putnam deputies tried two by-the-book tactics to rein in the runaway, as it circled at 21 to 40 mph (emphasis added):

Due to the possible dangers to the public with the unmanned vessel, attempts were made to shoulder the vessel with V2 to gain control. The deputies were unsuccessful because of the rotation speed of V1. A good Samaritan vessel brought PCSO Deputy Matthew Westbury to the scene and he boarded V2. Deputy Westbury attempted to use a rope to prop-foul V1 to disable the engine. While doing so, the rope entangled the engine of V2 disabling it. V2 became inoperable and began drifting.

A Recent Coast Guard ‘Shouldering’ Success in Maryland

The Putnam deputies’ second idea—they train for this—was to toss a length of rope in the path of the bullet boat and hope for a prop-wrap. They got a prop-wrap alright but on the wrong boat, which now turned Vessel 2 into an immobile “target boat.”

V2 drifted into the path of V1, and V1 struck V2 on the port side near the stern causing it to ramp over and become lodged on top of V2. Deputy Westbury and Deputy Riley jumped from V2 upon impact. Deputy Pleiman ducked between the console and the seat. Deputy Mullins lost her footing and hit the side of her head on the port side of the vessel, causing a laceration to her left ear.

Second Unplanned Swim

The technical term for one boat running up onto another is “ramping,” and, according to one retired marine patrol officer, it is very often a cause of death or severe injuries. Two of the four deputies on Vessel 2 avoided injury by jumping into the water.

Deputy John Riley was cited under the Florida statute covering Reckless or Careless Operation of a Vessel for “operating Vessel 1 at an unsafe speed for the maneuvers he was attempting, which caused him to be ejected.” This is a non-criminal violation, usually resulting in a $500 fine for a first offense..

In Florida, reckless operation can also be a misdemeanor or a felony, with jail time attached as well as fines. Elevated charges can happen if the consequences of this bad behavior results in accident, injury or death.

And while that may seem to apply in this case—with the subsequent injury accident—Fish & Wildlife apparently judged that Riley’s ejection and the subsequent vessel collision were discrete events. That is, somehow separate. The actual crash, according to the report, happened in the course of a legitimate law enforcement mission:

Law enforcement vessels may deviate from the navigational rules when such diversion is necessary to the performance of their duties and when such deviation may be safely accomplished. The collision of the vessels occurred while deputies were within the scope of their duties to stop the unmanned vessel from causing danger to the public.

The boss of the four deputies is Putnam County Sheriff Homer “Gator” DeLoach, who was asked whether there would be any in-house disciplinary action because of the cascading foul-ups of June 5. DeLoach did not reply to the email.

DeLoach might be wise to consider some modern-day folk wisdom that goes like this, “Falling down drunk is to be expected. If you are falling down sober, however, you just might have a problem.”

The author is a veteran journalist who served as Florida bureau chief for the New York Post before launching The St. Johns Citizen, which first published this story on June 26, 2026. It is reprinted here with permission.

By SELIM ALGAR

The Clay County Sheriff’s Office is replacing its Ford patrol vehicles with Chevrolet Tahoes and introducing new graphics, Sheriff Michelle Cook announced in a YouTube video.

Cook said that although the new rides run $5,000 more than the Ford police vehicles, the SUVs are expected to provide greater value over their crimefighting careers.

The Clay top cop said the Tahoes should last an additional 30,000 to 50,000 miles, extending the average life of a patrol vehicle from six to eight years to as many as 10 years.

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She also said the SUVs are expected to have more than double the resale value of the Fords.

Fleet Manager Jason Jeralds said the sheriff’s office is also becoming a General Motors-certified warranty center, allowing technicians to complete warranty repairs in-house.

Instead of sending vehicles to dealerships for covered repairs, General Motors will reimburse the agency for the work performed, offsetting maintenance costs while reducing downtime.

The sheriff’s office has also begun installing emergency lights, sirens and prisoner transport cages in-house rather than paying vendors.

Geralds estimated the change saves approximately $4,000 per vehicle in labor costs.

In addition, the agency is redesigning the graphics on its patrol vehicles after partnering with a local company to produce and apply the decals.

Cook said the previous vendor, located outside Clay County, owned the rights to the existing logo, requiring the sheriff’s office to create a new design.

Working with a local business is expected to reduce turnaround times and save more than $200 per vehicle.

Cook said residents will begin seeing the new Chevrolet Tahoes with updated graphics on Clay County roads over the next few weeks.

With all the scandals involving school wrestling in Clay County, it can be hard to keep track. This story is a follow-up to our 2024 series on hazing at Clay High School, including disturbing reports of real or threatened sexual violence.

Clay Schools have asked a judge to toss out a hazing case that involved a wrestling practice at Clay High School. District lawyers say the county is not responsible for bad things that happen within school walls as long the space is being used by a third party.

The district’s lawyers attached a single, lengthy deposition to the June 4 filing—that of the former student Mark Cormier, now 18. He spoke in his own words about how he came to be at the after-school practice session, during which he was held down by four other boys and threatened with penile amputation by one of them holding a hacksaw.

The June 4 motion for dismissal was filed before scheduled depositions had been taken from Clay’s High’s principal, vice principal, athletic’s director and coaches.

Cormier testified that he was a Clay High freshman when a friend and neighbor invited him to attend wrestling conditioning sessions. He had never wrestled before and attended only a small number of conditioning practices before the incident.

The former student said he believed he was participating in activities associated with the Clay High School wrestling team because the practices were held on school grounds and the coaches were from the school. He said he was unaware that the practice was under the auspices of the Green Cove Wrestling Club and unaware of the very existence of the club.

Cormier testified students were frequently unsupervised because coaches were absent or late. He said he watched others being hazed while no coach was present.

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Through interviews with parents, Clay News & Views has documented incidents in which a number of wrestlers suffered hazing which was tantamount to assault. Male wrestling students from Clay High and their parents told CN&V that boys witnessed and were also victims of sodomization with broom handles—a practice that media stories recount as typical in various wrestling communities across the nation.

Students said wrestlers were forcefully stripped and restrained as upperclassman simulated various sexual acts against them, some of them violent.

Cormier’s case is the only one that has gone to court. Victims and their parents said they decided against filing complaints because they feared social consequences and physical retribution from other wrestlers. As you will read later in the story, Mark Cromier’s case validated these fears.

The former student testified that he was initially afraid to tell his parents about his assault. When he did, his mom called the police. But the investigating detective ridiculed him and minimized his experience calling it “horseplay.” Arrest warrants were finally obtained, but police had chosen the wrong students. Cormier said he had never been asked by officers to identify the suspects beforehand.

He said that while the assault was underway, a coach entered the room and went to an area of “cubbies.”

“There was a coach that walked in and looked at the cubbies and was doing something in the cubbies in front of us, so they slowly set me down,” he told the inteviewer, a lawyer for the wrestling club.

The coach said nothing and went about his business. Cormier was asked whether the coach might not have noticed what was happening.

“I mean, not unless he was blind. I mean, you can walk in the door, and you can see the whole room,” Cormier said. “You can see everything that’s happening around you. And he just basically looks away and does stuff in the cubby.”

The deposition established that Cormier was not able to identify the coach from photographs. However, he was able to identify students.

Although the former student suffered brusing around his waist from the boys pulling his pants down, he testified that the lasting injuries were not physical but psychological, including anxiety, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, depression, nausea and vomiting when discussing the incident and fear triggered by reminders of the event, such as knives.

The experience, he said, disrupted what had been a normal high school life and discouraged him from attending social events or participating in school activities. He was shunned and lost friends.

Parents of other wrestlers told CN&V their students were told by members of the Clay High faculty that if they associated and communicated with Mark Cromier in any way, they could be sued by the Cromier family, which is not true. The wrestlers said because of the warning, they avoided Mark Cromier.

Cromier’s response was to become more involved with church youth groups where he found new friends. He did not graduate from Clay High, instead getting a high school GED. Cormier also testified that hazing incident brought out an interest in public speaking because he does not want the same thing to happen to other kids. He spoke of attending a Bible Institute to help spread the word of God.

Judge Gary Wilkinson has not ruled on Clay County School’s motion for summary judgement. Cormier’s lawyers have proposed a settlement with the other defendant, the Green Cove Wrestling Club. Trial has been set for five days in September.

Mikal Detoro was a volunteer wrestling coach at Wilkinson Junior High until he was arrested in April for attempting to have sex with an underage boy in his Jeep.

Now, Clay County School Board members are calling for a full investigation into Detoro’s stint as a wrestling coach, as allegations have emerged that Detoro did not have a completed, cleared level two background check.

The School Board policy requires a robust background check for volunteers who are around students for extended periods or without the supervision of a district employee.

The School District Administration, led by Superintendent David Broskie, enacts the policies set by the board.

Had the School Board policy been properly implemented, the background check would have prevented Mikal from being on campus as a coach, given his criminal record dating back nearly 20 years to 2008.

Mikal has a brother named Mark. Mark was named the head wrestling coach at Ridgeview High School in June of last year.

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Mark and his wife, Whitni, own the Iron Forge Wrestling Academy, which operates inside the gym facilities at Ridgeview High School

The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office busted Detoro as part of a larger sting operation, and they say Detoro’s Jeep was equipped with multiple cameras and was prepared for the illegal activity before he arrived.

When the news broke about Mikal’s arrest, his sister-in-law, Whitni, sent text messages to the families of local wrestlers advising them not to speak to the police about their investigation. Her reasoning? Speaking to the police would result in a HIPAA violation.

HIPAA, which stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, is a law enacted by Congress in 1996 to protect medical information from being shared or disclosed without the patient’s consent.

Unfortunately for the Detoros, talking to the police about a wrestling club would not violate federal law.

While news of a wrestling coach's involvement in illicit activities may have come as a shock to some school district leaders, there have been warning signs of a toxic environment in Clay’s wrestling clubs.

Two years ago, Clay News & Views exposed a lawsuit brought about by a student at Clay High School who alleged abuse at the hands of fellow wrestlers in the program.

Did the Clay County School District take any accountability for the incident? No, instead they attempted to discredit the allegations and blame the victim, alleging in a later court filing that the incident did happen but was the fault of the victim himself.

In 2025, Clay News & Views uncovered the story of Paul James “PJ” Cobbert, who was accused of multiple instances of sexual assault by one of his wrestlers.

Cobbert, who was the head wrestling coach at Fleming Island High School, avoided criminal charges only because the statute of limitations prevented the Clay County Sheriff’s Office from holding him accountable.

While under investigation by law enforcement, Cobbert was suspended from coaching the Fleming Island team. His replacement was none other than Mark Detoro, Mikal's brother and Whitni's husband. Mark was PJ’s assistant at the time of the investigation.

Despite being placed in charge of the Fleming Island wrestling program, parents alleged that Mark Detoro allowed PJ to remain in charge even though PJ was barred from campus. Mark Detoro and Cobbert were wrestlers together at Clay High School.

Cobbert was eventually stripped of his teaching license, resigned from his coaching job at Fleming Island High, and closed the wrestling gym he owned in Green Cove Springs.

The Detoros went on to open Iron Forge Wrestling, and Mark was named head wrestling coach at Ridgeview High. His accused brother, Mikal, was active at Iron Forge and Wilkinson Junior High.

The arrest of Detoro has left parents with many questions, the first of which is how a person without a level two background check was allowed unsupervised access to students.

Mikal Detoro has been previously accused of two crimes that involved minors. The first was in 2008, when a student accused Mikal Detoro of grabbing and twisting his arm, which the student said was a frequent occurrence.

The student also alleged that Mikal “liked to put his hands on other boys that go to his school.” The specific school where the incident occurred was not named in the report.

In 2016, Detoro was arrested on a felony charge of “Interference with a minor.” Court filings allege that Mikal Detoro drove to the house of two minors and took them to a closed park without their parents’ knowledge or consent.

Sheriff’s deputies located Detoro at the park with the minors, who advised the deputies they had shown objects such as a "pocket pussy, penis pump, and Playboy Magazines" over the course of several months of interactions with Detoro. Detoro was arrested at the park.

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Mikal was also charged with possession of Cannabis during the incident and was found to have sexual stimulation objects and devices in his car, along with male enhancement pills.

Given that all the information Clay News & Views discovered was publicly available, a level-two background check would have revealed Detoro’s record and raised red flags about his involvement with students.

It is unclear what changes, if any, Superintendent Broskie implemented after the Clay High and PJ Cobbert incidents. It is also unclear what mechanisms are in place to ensure that schools are following the background check policy moving forward.

The latest statewide inititative to clear junk boats from Florida waters is taking hold, but more so in some places than others. For example, here in Green Cove Springs, where there are around 30 boats anchoring long-term, only three are in compliance. Most of the rest could be subject to a $100 fine.

A couple years ago, a state study found a correlation between the number of “long-term stored vessels” and the incidence of derelict vessels, which surprised absolutely no one.

The goal is always the same—fewer derelict boats in Florida waters. Historically, that meant applying multiple laws—layers of them—to enforce best practices among boat owners. The cops quickly found some of these solutions were too labor intensive and competed with other duties.

The best example of that is a law which allows water cops to monitor a sea-trial so an owner can prove a particular vessel is not derelict. In the U.S., it’s enough of a chore that we don’t even require a sea-trial for captain-license candidates, people trying to prove they can safely take passengers to sea.

In recent years, Florida began designating “Anchoring Limitation Areas,” which prohibited a boat from anchoring in these marked zones for more than 45 days in a six-month period. In Monroe County, boats must be moved at least a half mile away from any place it had been anchored for 90 days.

Counties with more than 1.5 million people—Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Hillsborough—can restrict anchoring to 30 days in a given six-month period.

Fish & Wildlife officers—aka the “mullet sheriffs”—were given the power to designate vessels as being “at risk of becoming derelict,” triggering escalating enforcement punishments such as fines or the eventual confiscation of the boat in question.

Last year, Florida legislators enacted yet another law that applied to every waterway in the state. This marked a departure from most earlier anchoring limits. Rather than restrictions within a designated space, the law was a mandate based entirely on duration at anchor. The law went into effect on January 1.

Any boater anchored in one place for more than 14 days in a 30-day period is required to obtain a “Long Term Anchoring Permit” from Fish & Wildlife. The application process is online and costs nothing (though a cynic might add the word “yet”). The permit is valid for a year and must be renewed then or if the boat is moved more than a mile from its initial permited location.

The permit may be revoked if the vessel is a derelict vessel or at risk of becoming derelict as defined by state law or if it is in violation of marine toilet regs.

Failure to obtain a permit can result in a $100 fine for the first offense, $250 for the second and $500 for three or more offenses. A vessel that is the subject of three or more violations within a 24-month period and resulting in dispositions other than acquittal or dismissal must be declared a “public nuisance” and therefore subject to seizure by the state.

The idea behind the new law is to make easier for Fish & Wildlife to contact owners of anchored boats. Green Cove Springs Police Chief Shawn Hines, who was the city’s marine patrol officer before his promotion, said the city already knows owners of the ragtag fleet on its section of the St. Johns River.

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“In preparation for each hurricane season over the past several years, we have conducted an inventory of vessels anchored within our jurisdiction and maintained contact information for vessel owners should emergency notifications become necessary,” Hines said.

According to Fish & Wildlife, 491 long-term anchoring permits had been issued as of June 11. Here is the breakdown by county, alphabetically:

Eight in Bay, 11 in Brevard, 2 in Broward, 35 in Charlotte, 3 in Citrus, 3 in Clay, 3 in Collier, 5 in Duval, 14 in Escambia, 1 in Franklin, 2 in Hendry, 9 in Hillsborough, 2 in Indian River, 1 in Lake, 9 in Lee, 7 in Manatee, 4 in Marion, 14 in Martin, 26 in Miami-Dade, 70 in Monroe, 2 in Nassau, 1 in Okaloosa, 151 in Palm Beach, 5 in Pasco, 53 in Pinellas, 3 in St. Johns, 8 in St. Lucie, 7 in Santa Rosa, 1 in Sarasota, 26 in Volusia and 2 in Wakula.

Palm Beach County, a major battlefield in Florida’s anchoring wars, had the most permits at 151.

Three Clay County boat owners interviewed for this story—all of whom have vessels anchored at Green Cove—were ignorant of the new requirement to obtain an anchoring permit. One of them conflated the new law with other anti-anchoring measures being enforced in Jacksonville waters 20 miles north.

Florida Long Term Anchoring Permits Issued as of June 11, 2026

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There is likely a dynamic in play between various Florida jurisdictions. As you might expect, folks with boats that need to be stored at anchor are likely to migrate from high-enforcement jurisdictions to less strict places such as Clay County. (The county’s marine patrol deputy did not reply to an email inquiry.)

Chief Hines, meanwhile, said that the City of Green Cove Springs will get around to enforcing the law eventually:

Like any enforcement initiative, implementation will be based on available resources, staffing levels and operational priorities. This is a project that the department plans to undertake, but will be initiated when resources and competing priorities allow for effective and consistent enforcement.

Portrait of an Anchorage, Green Cove Springs

Interestingly enough, there were three boats at Green Cove that appear to have been secured to moorings. As a practical matter, this is perfectly sensible because it allows for a much heavier anchor, but for these semi-permanent fixtures to be legal in Florida requires a different, difficult to obtain permit from the state.

In March, Palm Beach Police charged a man operating an unapproved mooring rental service with a single count of Dumping of Litter “in an amount exceeding 500 pounds.” The litter in question was the anchor weight and chain for a mooring, also known as “mooring tackle.” The crime is a third-degree felony, which can put someone in prison for up to five years.

Derelict-boat numbers, according to Fish & Wildlife:

• The average cost to remove a derelict vessel from waters of the state is $750 per foot.

• The average length of derelict vessels removed is 32 feet.

• In 2020, the total cost of derelict vessel removal was almost $2 million. That increased to almost $5 million in 2021, to approximately $6 million in 2022, to approximately $7 million in 2023, and almost $13 million in 2024.

• 691 popular overnight anchoring locations have been identified in Florida.

• Of these unmanaged anchoring areas, 319 were used primarily for long-term storage, 243 were used primarily by transient cruising vessels for short overnight stays, and 129 were used for an indeterminate mixture of storage and cruising.

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Florida’s saltwater fishermen are frustrated. Despite deploying hundreds of thousands of dollars in motors, molded fiberglass, fuel, rods, reels and YETI coolers, this benighted cohort is being outwitted by creatures with brains the size of a walnut.

Sharks are eating their lunch…literally. Dinner, too. Pretty soon these brash bulls will be (flirting with) their wives.

How it happens: Having hooked a fish, the angler begins the process of reeling in his catch. He is fighting the fish, and the fish is fighting back. The line is taut. Then, suddenly it’s not. Reeling becomes easy-peasy, and the reason why is that a shark has bitten off as much of the aft portion of the fish as it could.

Tailess, the fish has lost all purchase, and, besides, it’s dead.

This is not a new phenomenon. What is new: The frequency. Sharks are back, baybee! They’re practicing a little angler depredation in the morning, then nipping New Smyrna Beach-goers in the afternoon.

This state of affairs has caused great sadness among fishermen. The collective gnashing of teeth was evident on Facebook. These poor guys are hurting.

“Yeah, nothing like blowing $500 in fuel catching a s***load of fish and losing them to sharks. Definitely sucks,” Philip Punch wrote.

“Absolutely the worst,” Thomas Botwinski lamented. “I lost six consecutive nice yellowtail hookups last trip.”

“This is the worse it has ever been in 50 years of fishing. EVERYWHERE, the sharks are trained now to run to boats for an easy meal, and, to the point, it’s impossible to fish,” sniffled Bob Hubbard.

Referred to collectively as “The Taxman,” the culprits are usually bull sharks or sandbar sharks (with hammerheads pitching in against the tarpon-catching crowd). A 2022 survey found that 77 percent of recreational anglers and charter guides had experienced shark depredation.

The cull-the-herd proponents want to eliminate the problem by either “harvesting” more sharks and grilling the steaks out of them or via 12-gauge deer slugs. (Alas, they complain, sandbar sharks are a federally protected species.)

Here’s some pertinent scientific-sounding talk:

Bull sharks are highly adaptable predators that use sounds, vibrations and electrical signals to track struggling or injured prey. Reeling in a hooked fish mimics an easy meal, conditioning bull sharks to associate fishing boats and struggling fish with a quick feeding opportunity.

Yeah, I don’t think anyone has proven that a bull shark needs the presence of a boat to find his next meal, but here, enjoy some more science gobbledegook, this time sneering at the “fishers” (not fishermen, not anymore), whose identities are apparently being threatened:

Underlying and deeply rooted conflicts around poor perceptions of management legitimacy and threatened fisher identities add complexity to the fisher–shark conflict, and call for broader interventions beyond these visible effects.

Enter U.S. Senator Rick Scott of Florida. In July 2025, Scott and Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii introduced the SHARKED Act, which would establish a task force to solve the depradation problem. The bill has passed the House and now awaits a final floor vote in the U.S. Senate.

The bill’s announcement noted the fisherman frustration, federal regulators’ lack of empathy and a most sincere concern about the possible harm that could come to the feasting shark population. Quoth the press release (emphasis added):

Hooked fish being landed by anglers or commercial fishermen creates an unnatural and easy meal for sharks and exposes them to potentially harmful fishing gear. As the rate of shark depredation has increased, fishermen have become increasingly frustrated by the issue and a continued lack of response from the fisheries management community.

Maybe, the fisheries management community is unsympathetic because overall shark populations continue to be way down from historical norms, and even though there may be a comeback in places such as Florida, it’s only a partial comeback. Plus, complaining about sharks doing shark things is a bit like calling the police because some goshdarn woodpecker won’t let you sleep late on Sunday morning.

Meanwhile, the sportsmen are lashing out, directing their frustration against the ecotourism activity of “shark diving.” This somewhat silly passtime (think bungee-jumping) supports it’s own little Florida industry. In response, two Florida congressmen introduced the Florida Safe Seas Act, which is also pending in the Senate.

This legislation would outlaw feeding sharks in federal waters off Florida, feeding being a necessary precursor to attracting sharks to a central location where they can be observed by divers paying $250 each for the experience. Florida has already outlawed the practice in state waters.

Again, the theory (which is treated as fact) is that chumming for Jaws by a handful of small operators is somehow teaching these beasts to associate boats with food on a species-wide level. Yet another one big maybe.

The only real hope is that the Task Force might come up with some tech solution that allows boaters to somehow jam a shark’s onboard fish-detection sensors. Either that, or maybe we just fall back on the solution du jour for a whole host of today’s thorny issues—drones. There must be a way to use drones here, no?

Otherwise, maybe we do nothing. After all, we are talking about an expensive hobby, not some existential threat. You can keep fishing on nature’s terms or take up golf. (Your wife isn’t really hooking up with Bill the Bull, is she?)

What was it that one unsympathetic commenter said, responding to that Facebook conversation about shark predation?

“Unless you have grown gills and fins, you’re the problem not the sharks. Almost no one gets attacked by a shark sitting in the bar or at the mall, and I’ve never had one steal fish from me at Publix,” Tony Spagna said.

• New Orange Park Police Chief sworn in — Cody Monroe was sworn in as the new Orange Park Chief of Police, pledging to lead with integrity and keep the community safe. (Clay Today)

• Sheriff’s Office opening North Operations Center at Orange Park Mall — CCSO is partnering with the mall to create a central law-enforcement hub in the northern part of the county. (Clay Today)

• Fire Rescue launches field blood transfusion program — Clay County Fire Rescue paramedics can now administer life-saving blood transfusions in the field before patients reach the hospital. (Clay Today)

• School district names new administrative leadership — Clay County District Schools announced new principal/administrative appointments for the coming school year as the academic year wrapped up. (Clay County District Schools)

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🚓 Public Safety / Crime

• Manhunt in Jennings State Forest — As of June 18, CCSO was searching for a man wanted for grabbing a woman in the forest. (CCSO News)

• Orange Park Mall disturbance — Investigation underway into a fight among juveniles and gunshots heard nearby Saturday night. (Clay Today Police Briefs)

• Fleming Island Man Apprehended After SWAT Standoff — The man was arrested after firing a gun in his backyard. (Clay Today Crime)

📅 Upcoming Events & Public Meetings

• Impact Clay Train — Sat, June 20, 10 AM–12 PM at Clay Hill Elementary School, Middleburg. (claycountygov.com)

• Free youth sports & school physicals — Sat, June 20, with Ascension St. Vincent’s Clay participating. (Clay Today)

• Board of County Commissioners Meeting — Tue, June 22, 4 PM at the County Administration Building. (claycountygov.com)

• Countywide Flood Adaptation Plan Public Outreach Meeting — Tues, June 23. (claycountygov.com)

• School Board July 2026 Meeting— Thu, June 25th, 6 PM, at Fleming Island High School

🚧 Roads

• Road & lane closures, June 20–26 — See the county’s weekly closure report. Crews are paving Lakeview St., Hilltop St., and part of SW Pecan St. in Keystone Heights. (Clay County Newsroom)

Clay New & Views was invited to record the event, and we present the recording unedited and without commentary. Don’t worry, we’ll offer plenty of commentary later 😉

THIRD OF THREE STORIES

The sky is not falling!

Some local and state elected officials, their appointed bureaucrats and favorite megaphones in the media want you to think it will if you vote “yes” for the proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot. The amendment increases the homestead exemption from $50,000 to $150,000 the first year and $250,000 thereafter.

The naysayers are telling you that if the homestead initiative passes, counties will have to cut crucial services. You won’t be able to go to Walmart without being robbed. Your homes will be left to burn, citizens will drop dead because rescues don’t have the money to operate and there will be potholes in our roads big enough to swallow a bass boat.

I’m not a brain surgeon, just a blonde. But I can read, do basic math and recognize when my property tax bill is growing faster than my paycheck. So, I studied the homestead amendment, read the legislators’ reasons for putting it on the ballot, reviewed the arguments against it, and researched the facts. I, also, spoke directly with a legislator.

Legislators contend there are local politicians throughout the state who are spending taxpayer money like drunken sailors on shore leave. They also say they regularly hear from folks in Florida desperately pleading for help from high and rising property taxes. The homeowners tell how they have sacrificed and saved to buy small homes and pay off their mortgages, yet local governments have raised taxes so high they now have to choose between property taxes, food and the medication they need to keep them alive.

Granted, over the years, history has taught us that information coming from Tallahassee should be taken with a grain of salt—or the whole saltshaker—and examined carefully. In this case, I found the legislators’ reasons for the increase in exemptions were supported by something rarely seen in politics: actual evidence.

Nevertheless, some local officials are having a hissy-fit over the amendment. They tell us our county is already “lean” and operating on a shoestring budget. They brag they are currently cutting expenses by not replacing “non-essential employees” who retire or leave.

While no county official was willing to put their name on the claim, a June 9 Florida Times-Union story quoted “the county” defending its spending habits:

Clay County continuously leads the way to run as efficiently as possible while getting the most value for taxpayer dollars.

That statement should come with a complimentary pair of hip waders because it’s so full of bull fertilizer it could green up every pasture from Middleburg to Keystone Heights.

And, I’m still wondering why non-essential employees were hired in the first place.

We have some smart, honest, hardworking politicians and solid county employees who are doing their jobs to the best of their abilities. We also have some that are not—but paid like they were.

During my 30-plus years of reporting on Clay County, I’ve watched closely the habits of those who are spending of our tax money. We’ve had, and continue to have waste, duplication, pet projects and lots of creative spending masquerading as necessity. I’ve seen county officials spend money that benefitted local citizens about as much as a dead possum on Highway 17.

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The list of examples of wasteful spending and poor financial decisions are longer than the list of reasons why our tax collector rarely shows up for work. But here’s just a few.

We rank 25^th in population among Florida’s 67 counties. Yet, official sources show that many of our appointed officals, including county manager, fire chief, acting fire chief, Orange Park’s town manager, Green Cove Springs’ city manager, and numerous others are paid some of the highest salaries and benefits in the entire state. This includes counties and municipalities with larger populations, seaports, airports and utilities.

Years ago, we voted to cap our commissioners’ salaries. But some of our other elected officials’ enjoy huge paychecks that are larger than those of our state representatives and governor. They say Tallahassee sets a “formula” for their salaries. They want us to believe they have no choice but to abide by the formula and take raises big enough to choke an Everglades python because the state says they must.

But that’s just another dog that won’t hunt.

Those formulas are suggestions, not mandates. Salaries are suppposed to be based on what the county can afford. And a county of our size cannot afford the huge salaries of some of our elected and appointed officials or the generous benefits and contributions to investment accounts that resemble executive compensations on Wall Street.

There’s lots more examples of “What the heck were they thinking?” spending.

Our elected officials donated untold tax dollars to “charities” whose directors, we later discovered, used the donations to buy homes, cars, vacations and lots of Pina Coladas. Developers were given breaks on impact fees, forcing us to pony up for growth. Then there’s that boatload of money the county gave to build a pickleball court in Green Cove, while most local residents have no idea what pickleball is, have never played and never will?

The county has also contributed to tax losses. Recently, instead of purchasing less expensive property elsewhere in the county, officials bought a 1.4 acre commercial lot in the City of Green Cove Springs to build the $15 million, 30,000-square-foot Economic Development Service Facility, that had little demonstrated need.

This decision took the property off the tax roles and shifted the burden to the already overtaxed residents of Green Cove and their cash-strapped goverment. But county officials are pridefully busting their buttons—and a few Spanx seams—celebrating because they made sure the building had a gym for employees.

If you need more proof that money management is not some of our local politicians’ forte, you’ve got it. We just found out in the last couple of days, there is a gaping $35 million deficit hole in next years’ budget, even before the homestead exemption is decided.

The Chicken Littles won’t tell you that businesses and second homeowners will still pay 100 percent of their property taxes. They don’t mention that our county already has a multitude of homes, with more being rapidly built, that are above $250,000 and into the millions, and will continue to require large homeowner taxes.

There’s silence about the fact that our operating budgets do not come from just property taxes alone. Instead, a substantial part comes from a whole slew of services that the county taxes and collects: local sales tax, service taxes on gas, electricity, natural gas, water, sewer, stormwater, numerous types of telecommunications, fees for public right of ways, building permits, planning and zoning applications, impact fees, tourist development taxes, fines and forfeitures, traffic and parking fines, court related revenues, code enforcement fines—and the list goes on.

We’ve heard zilch about the shared state revenues given to the county from sales tax, fuel taxes and other revenue-sharing programs, as well as state and federal grants for public safety, housing, transportation, emergency management and environmental protection.

We have, indeed, heard a few reasons why some folks don’t want us to approve the initiative. But the opponents’ reasons sound like they’ve been standing too close to the mosquito fogger in their tin-foil hats.

They say the initiative is a grab for power by Governor DeSantis. They tell us we are in danger of losing “home rule” or local control. With less tax money rolling in, those opposing contend officials will have to go to Tallahassee with their hats in hand and allow Tallahassee to be the boss of us in exchange for part of the secret stash it’s hoarding.

But legislators said, the joke’s on the hat-holders, because there is no such stash. Our state representatives insists that if the amendment passes, local officials will keep their home-rule power. They are simply going to have to take up a loop in their fat pants and stop spending like the Kardashians.

The homestead initiative actually puts a little power back where it belongs—with the folks paying the bills. If officials can’t make do with the wagonload of taxes they already collect or cut the fat in their bloated budgets, they can come to the taxpayers, show their math and make their case. Then, we can decide at the ballot box whether there is a need or if they want us to fulfill somebody’s wish list.

For some people, property taxes are just another line item in their budget. For others, they’re the difference between paying for prescriptions, keeping the lights on and making ends meet.

Before you vote, think about who deserves that money more. Is it officials who continue to increase their salaries, retirement and money for boondoggle projects? Or, is it us—the homeowners who need a financial break—especially those eating Spam while struggling to stay in the homes they’ve worked a lifetime to afford?

PREVIOUSLY

The author is president of the Florida Policy Project, a nonpartisan public policy research organization focused on Florida’s biggest challenges, including affordability, housing, transportation, and insurance. He served for 12 years in the Florida Legislature, including service in both the Florida House and Senate. This story first appeared on June 2, 2026 in the Florida Trident and is reprinted here with permission.

SECOND OF THREE STORIES

By JEFF BRANDES

Everyone is talking about property taxes. Almost nobody is talking about power.

That’s strange because power, not taxes, is what this debate is really about. The sales pitch is simple: property taxes are unpopular, homeowners are angry, government has grown, and cutting tax bills will provide relief. Who doesn’t like that? But there is a difference between cutting taxes and changing who controls government.

Florida is not debating a tax cut. Florida is debating a fundamental redesign of how local government is financed.

For more than half a century, Florida has embraced home rule. The idea was simple: Local communities should make local decisions. If a city council spends too much, voters can replace it. If a county commission raises taxes, voters can replace it. The people making spending decisions are accountable to the people paying the bills. That system is imperfect, but it is transparent. If your local government fails, you know exactly where to direct your frustration and exactly who to vote against.

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Now imagine a different system. Imagine counties and cities that can no longer fund themselves. Imagine local officials traveling to Tallahassee not to seek a grant for a new project, but to keep deputies on patrol, firefighters in stations, and ambulances on the road. At that point, who is really running local government? The answer is not the county commission. The answer is not the city council.

The answer is whoever controls the money.

That is the part nobody wants to discuss. Property taxes are not simply a revenue source. They are the mechanism that allows local governments to govern themselves. Remove enough of that revenue and local governments do not disappear. They become dependent. And dependency changes behavior. A business dependent on one customer changes its behavior. A nonprofit dependent on one donor changes its behavior. A county dependent on Tallahassee changes its behavior. The money moves. The incentives move. The accountability moves. And eventually, the power moves.

PART ONE

PART THREE

There is an irony here that should give conservatives pause. A proposal intended to shrink government could ultimately centralize it. When counties and cities become financially dependent on Tallahassee, the governor effectively becomes the mayor of communities he was never elected to run. Imagine a future governor deciding which counties receive funding for deputies, which cities receive support for fire services, and which communities must wait. Local government becomes less local. Home rule becomes a slogan instead of a governing principle.

Supporters frame this debate as a battle between taxpayers and government. That is the wrong framework. The real question is whether Florida wants independent local governments or dependent local governments. Because independent local government means paying your own bills.

The numbers involved are staggering. Property taxes generate tens of billions of dollars each year for local governments. State economists have modeled scenarios creating roughly an $18.3 billion hole. Municipal governments receive approximately 43 percent of their general fund revenue from property taxes. Property taxes account for roughly 79 percent of municipal tax revenue. Those are not trimming-around-the-edges numbers. Those are rebuild-the-engine-while-the-plane-is-flying numbers. Yet much of the public discussion proceeds as though this is simply a tax cut. It isn’t. It is one of the largest transfers of financial responsibility in modern Florida history.

Maybe it works. Maybe local governments become dramatically more efficient. Maybe new revenue sources emerge. Maybe the state permanently assumes a larger role. But if that’s the plan, let’s be honest enough to say so. What we should not do is pretend the consequences stop at the property tax bill.

State economists are already projecting structural deficits beginning in fiscal year 2027-28 and growing in the years that follow. If Florida itself is heading toward tighter budgets, is this really the moment to shift even greater responsibility for local government onto the state? Florida may be creating a future where local governments are increasingly dependent on a state government that is itself under growing fiscal pressure.

Then there are the people largely missing from this conversation. Nearly one-third of Floridians rent their homes. If local governments replace property taxes with higher fees, assessments, utility taxes, sales taxes, or state transfers, renters will still pay. Businesses will still pay. Consumers will still pay. The bill does not disappear. It changes addresses.

Milton Friedman often reminded people that government has no money of its own. Every dollar government spends comes from somebody else. That remains true today. The question is not whether Floridians will pay for local government. The question is how. And more importantly, who will decide.

That is the blast radius nobody is talking about.

Because once the dust settles, Floridians may discover they did not merely change a tax system. They changed the balance of power between local communities and the state itself. And unlike a tax bill, that is a change that will be far harder to reverse.

The author is a veteran investigative journalist who produces the Substack newsletter Seeking Rents, covering Florida politics and policies. This story was first published on June 14, 2026 and is reprinted here with permission.

FIRST OF THREE STORIES

By JASON GARCIA

Cities, counties and towns across Florida could lose close to a quarter of their annual property tax collections, if voters approve a state-backed ballot measure this fall that would cut and cap local property taxes.

That’s according to a new analysis by the state’s Revenue Estimating Conference—also known as the REC—a panel of nonpartisan economists tasked with forecasting the financial impacts of proposed legislation.

It’s the first full analysis of the seismic property tax plan that Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature rushed to pass during a 28-hour special session earlier this month.

The proposed constitutional amendment—which will only take effect if at least 60 percent of Florida voters support it in a statewide referendum in November—was conceived so quickly and with so little input from anyone outside the inner circles of Tallahassee leadership that even legislators who voted for the plan gave contradictory explanations of how it would actually work.

The REC analysis—which, to be very clear, should have been done before state lawmakers voted on this—found that the proposal would quickly lop off more than $8 billion a year in funding for local governments by supersizing a tax break for primary homeowners.

That provision, which would be phased in over two years, would generally increase the state’s homestead tax exemption from $50,000 to $250,000 — meaning, for example, that the owner of a $750,000 home would pay taxes to their local city or county government as if their home were worth only $500,000.

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But the local revenue losses would widen rapidly from there—thanks largely to a second tax break that would suppress the annual tax bills for all other property owners, too.

That piece of the package would further restrict the year-to-year growth in tax assessments on all non-homestead property—everything from a New York couple’s vacation condo in Miami Beach to the Walt Disney Co.’s Magic Kingdom theme park.

Florida already caps increases to the annual tax assessments on non-homestead property at no more than 10 percent a year, the result of Big Business-backed constitutional amendments that passed in 2008 and 2018.

This new proposal would lower that ceiling even further so that the assessed value of non-homestead property could climb by no more than 5 percent a year—no matter how much the actual market value of the property rises.

In fact, one of the most striking findings from the REC’s analysis is just how quickly that tighter tax cap would compound, as the gap between what a piece of non-homestead property is worth and what it is taxed at steadily widens over time.

Local government revenue losses just from the non-homestead tax cap would swell more than six-fold over the first five years it is in effect — from around $350 million to more than $2.2 billion. And the tax differentials would keep on stacking up over time.

Altogether, the REC estimates that the combined package—the $250,000 homestead exemption plus the 5 percent annual non-homestead assessment cap—would wipe out nearly $12 billion in annual funding for local governments by the 2031-32 fiscal year.

And that does not include other not-yet-calculable impacts from the proposed constitutional amendment, which would, among other things, make it possible to continue increasing the homestead exemption — all the way up to 100 percent — without another statewide referendum.

For perspective: $12 billion would be somewhere in the ballpark of 24 percent of total local government property tax collections, based on the REC’s property tax growth forecasts and a bit of back-of-the-napkin math by Seeking Rents.

That’s an almost-unfathomable hit to local governments that pay for police, fire, parks, roads, sidewalks, stormwater drains, sewage plants, libraries, animal shelters, trash collection, summer camps and so much more.

Cities, counties and towns would have to make that money up somehow—through some inevitable combination of cutting public services, raising property tax rates, and charging new taxes and fees.

To understand how painful that process would be: Recall that the Florida House of Representatives last year proposed cutting the statewide sales tax from 6 percent to 5.25 percent. That three-quarters-of-a-point cut to sales tax would have reduced the state’s general revenue — the flexible pot of money that legislators are free to spend however they want — by about 10 percent.

And the Florida Legislature absolutely fell apart over it.

What was supposed to be a 60-day session dragged for more than 100 days as House and Senate leaders in Tallahassee proved utterly incapable of completing a state budget with that big a hole in the middle of it. They clashed over what existing programs to slash and which new projects to leave unfunded—and ultimately abandoned the sales tax cut entirely. The Florida Capitol has been basically dysfunctional for two years now, in large part because of the animosity that developed during that budget fight.

In other words, Republican legislators in Tallahassee could not handle even a 10 percent cut to their general revenue.

But, of course, they have no problems tossing an even bigger budget grenade into the laps of local governments.

PART TWO

PART THREE

Dozens of Clay County residents packed the Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) chambers Monday night, delivering an overwhelming message to their elected officials: keep data centers out of Clay County.

The June 9th meeting drew one of its largest crowds in recent memory as the board held the first of two required public hearings on a proposed 12-month moratorium that would halt any applications for data center facilities in unincorporated Clay County while staff studies potential impacts. A final vote is scheduled for the June 23rd meeting.

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No application for a data center is currently before the county, and commissioners acknowledged that no developer has approached the county with such a proposal. The moratorium was initiated preemptively, driven in part by what one commissioner called a glaring gap in the county’s land development code, which currently has no regulatory framework for data centers.

“Our land development code is completely silent on this,” said Commissioner Betsy Condon, who originally proposed the moratorium. “We’re trying to address some of those things before they become issues.”

A Room Full of Opposition

Speaker after speaker approached the podium to urge the board to pass — and in some cases extend or make permanent — restrictions on data centers. Concerns centered on three main issues: water, electricity, and the character of Clay County itself.

Bruce Reynolds, a retired environmental protection specialist from Green Cove Springs, offered some of the most detailed testimony of the night. Clay County, he said, currently uses roughly 30 million gallons of water per day, and a single data center can consume anywhere from 500,000 to 5 million gallons per day — with large AI training hubs drawing even more. He pointed to a $20.5 million class action settlement reached in March against Amazon Data Services over alleged nitrate groundwater contamination in Georgia as a warning sign.

“It is a real challenge to try to distinguish between what is supported by engineering and environmental science, and what is primarily marketing messaging — science versus sales pitch,” Reynolds said. “To me, a moratorium makes great sense.”

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Valeria Weaver, a Green Cove Springs mother who said she took paid time off to attend the meeting, drew some of the night’s largest applause, which the chair had to repeatedly remind the audience was against meeting rules.

“I stand politically conservative Republican, and I say that not to bring politics into this,” Weaver said, “but there’s a lot of people here and we might vote differently, we might believe different things, but there’s a lot of us that stand on the same ground when it comes to this topic.”

She also noted that Jackson County commissioners had voted that very day to permanently ban AI data centers. “If they can do it, you guys can do it,” she said. “Stand for us. We’re all neighbors.”

Nicole Eaton of Orange Park urged the board to use the moratorium period to write permanent regulations “so protective that data centers look elsewhere,” citing Florida Senate Bill 44 — recently signed by Gov. DeSantis — as a law affirming that local governments retain full authority over zoning and land use decisions related to data centers.

One resident offered a pointed challenge to the board on the question of priorities during drought season: “Data centers pull the most water on hot summer days during seasonal droughts when the aquifer drops in July,” she said. “Who gets priority? The servers or the people?”

Not everyone was opposed. Marcia Garcia of Green Cove Springs made a case for keeping the door open. “I think it’s important to resist the temptation to oppose data centers just because it has become fashionable in the last few months to oppose them,” she said. She argued that the moratorium should be modified to allow applications to be submitted and reviewed, so the county could learn which types of facilities might actually seek to locate there.

Bruce Jackson, a Jacksonville-based data center industry veteran who said he has been attending Nassau County’s parallel workshops on the issue, pushed back on what he called outdated assumptions about water use. Modern AI-oriented data centers, he argued, use closed-loop cooling systems similar to a car radiator — dramatically more efficient than the older evaporative cooling systems most critics were referencing.

He also cited Loudoun County, Virginia, which collected $749 million from data centers last year, 45 percent of its entire general revenue fund.

Commissioners Split

The board, which will cast a binding vote on June 23rd, offered a preview of where members stand — and the picture is not unanimous.

Commissioner John Sgromolo came down firmly on the side of skepticism. Citing Clay County voters’ overwhelming passage of a conservation tax amendment—“at over 70%, which in an election is wild” — he said the public’s environmental values were already well established. He asked the county attorney to research whether a full ban on data centers, similar to what Jackson County passed, would be legally permissible in Florida.

“Just because you can doesn’t mean you should,” he said. “In terms of the juice not being worth the squeeze — in my opinion, with these data centers, it’s just not. There are way too many unknowns.”

Betsy Condon, the commissioner who introduced the moratorium, also signaled her support, describing water as her primary concern and noting that she lives in the recharge area of the Florida aquifer. She said she had been following Nassau County’s data center workshops closely and emphasized that a city in Mesa, Arizona, that had eagerly welcomed a data center, “said if they had it to do over again, they would never do it.”

Curiously, BOCC Chair Kristen Burke offered no comments or opinions on data centers during the meeting.

The most vocal dissent came from Commissioner Alexandra Compere, who argued the board could not afford to take a year off from the conversation, given Clay County’s financial position.

“We quite literally do not have 12 months,” she said, citing a $50 million budget deficit the board had discussed in a morning workshop. She pointed to rising unemployment in Clay County, now over 4% and climbing, and argued that the tax revenues generated by data centers in comparable counties in Virginia and Georgia were too significant to dismiss. Loudoun County, Virginia, she noted, collected $900 million from data centers last year — nearly matching its entire operating budget.

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Compere also claimed that Clay County already has at least one data center within its borders, though she did not identify it, arguing it would be misleading for the board to treat data centers as entirely foreign to the county. Clay News & Views was not able to find any evidence of a data center currently operating in the county.

“There are good data centers and bad data centers,” she said. “And frankly, 12 months in this industry — asking for 12 months before changes that can help the infrastructure of a county — we don’t have 12 months.”

She stopped short of saying she would vote against the moratorium, and invited residents who wanted to change her mind to contact her directly.

Jim Renninger took a more pragmatic middle position, framing the issue in terms of national security and technological inevitability. “AI is going to rule the world for the future,” he said. “You’re going to use a data center — it just may be in China. Do you want your data stored in a Chinese storage facility?” He said the board was “taking a measured approach.”

Renninger also did not mince words when the topic of kickbacks came up, after one resident alleged online that commissioners were being paid off. “If you were to accuse me of taking kickbacks, I want to refer you to Sheriff Cook,” he said flatly. “That’s illegal, and I resent that wholeheartedly. I’ve spent my life representing the public.”

The board will hold the second and final public hearing on the moratorium ordinance at its June 23rd meeting, where a vote is expected. If approved, the moratorium would freeze all data center applications for one year while county staff develops regulatory standards and brings recommendations back to the board.

Christopher Suarez, a teacher at Ridgeview High School, has been placed on administrative leave after being arrested and accused of sending sexually explicit messages and pictures to a student.

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Per the arrest affidavit filed for his criminal case, Suarez attempted to take his own life by slitting his wrists after being contacted by Clay County Sheriff’s office personnel.

Suarez was treated for his injuries and later booked into the Clay County jail.

Suarez is listed as an “Industrial Education Teacher” in the staff directory for Ridgeview High School. He lists “HVAC Teacher” as his profession on social media and is a Marine veteran.

Suarez has no prior criminal record in Clay County, aside from a handful of traffic infractions. He is officially charged with six counts of “Distributing Obscene Material Harmful to a Minor” and one count of “Use of a two-way communication device to facilitate a felony.”

Suarez has been officially declared indigent by the court system and has been appointed a public attorney. His bond is currently set to $525,021, and his next court appearance is scheduled for July 7th, 2026.

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Heather Boucher will no longer be the County Commission Auditor as of July 1st, 2026. Her resignation was submitted via a letter and comes on the heels of a tumultuous few weeks for Boucher.

Earlier in May, Boucher began behind-the-scenes conversations with each County Commissioner and demanded a $44,000 pay raise.

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Bocuher later admitted at a County Commissioner meeting that she threatened to quit if her demands weren’t met.

It was later discovered that Boucher’s official job responsibilities were redundant, as the Comptroller’s Office was responsible for auditing the Commissioner’s budget per the Florida Constitution.

And even as the extra responsibilities were thrown Boucher’s way, it was clear to many in the county that she was not very busy.

Now that the position will be vacant and is likely redundant, the Commissioners have the opportunity to save taxpayers $191,000 per year by not hiring for the position moving forward.

The Board of County Commissioners next meeting is June 9th at 4:00 pm.